Free A Fortune-Teller Told Me by Tiziano Terzani

another Terzani, who had gone far indeed. Since boyhood he had worked as a city street cleaner, walking the tram tracks with a spade and rake to clear away the horse droppings.
    Why did I practically flee from home when I was fifteen, to go and wash dishes all over Europe? Why, when I arrived in Asia, did I feel so much at home that I stayed there? Why does the heat of the tropics not tire me? Why do I sit cross-legged without discomfort? Is it the charm of the exotic? The wish to get as far away as possible from the povertystrickenworld of my childhood? Perhaps. Or perhaps the blind man was right, if he meant that something in me—not my body, which I certainly got from my parents, but something else—came from another source, that brought with it a baggage of old yearnings and homesickness for latitudes known to me in some life before this one.
    Slumped in the backseat of the Oriental Hotel’s car, I let these thoughts whirl around in my head, and amused myself by chasing them as if they were not mine. Could it be that I believed in reincarnation? I had never thought seriously about it. But why not? Why not imagine life as a relay race in which, like the baton that passes from hand to hand, something not physical, not definable, something like a collection of memories, a store of experiences lived elsewhere, passes from body to body and from death to death, and all the while grows and expands, gathering wisdom and advancing toward that state of grace that concludes every life: toward illumination, in Buddhist terms? That would help to explain my difference from the Terzani clan, and to interpret the blind man’s statement that as a child I was passed from one family to another.
    At times we all have the disquieting sensation of having already experienced something that we know is in fact happening for the first time, of having already been in a place where we are sure we have never set foot. Where does this feeling of
déjà vu
come from? From a “before”? That would surely be the easiest explanation. And where have I been, if there is a “before”? Perhaps somewhere in Asia, an Asia without concrete, without skyscrapers, without superhighways. So I pondered as I watched the dull, gray streets of Bangkok as they slid past the window, suffocated by the exhaust of thousands and thousands of cars.
    My interpreter lived on the outskirts of the city, and I had offered to see her home. The car entered a bit of motorway I did not know. “A very dangerous stretch, this,” she said. “People die here all the time. Do you see those cars?” In the shadows of an underpass I saw two strange vans with Thai writing on them, and some men in blue overalls standing nearby. “The body snatchers,” said the woman. It was the first time I had heard the word in Bangkok. The story behind it was grisly.
    According to popular belief, when a person dies violently his spirit does not rest in peace. And if, in the moment of death, the body is mutilated, decapitated, crushed or torn to pieces, that spirit becomes particularlyrestless; unless the prescribed rites are quickly performed it goes to join the enormous army of “wandering spirits.” These spirits, along with the evil
phii
, constitute one of the great problems of today’s Bangkok. Hence the importance of the “body snatchers,” volunteers from Buddhist associations who cruise around the city collecting the bodies of people who have died violently. They put the pieces together and perform the appropriate rites so that the souls may depart in peace, and not hang about playing tricks on the living.
    Apart from murder victims and suicides, the most obvious candidates for becoming wandering spirits are those killed in road accidents. That is why the Buddhist associations station their vans at the most notorious black spots on the roads, and why their men stand guard, tuned to the police radio frequencies, ready to rush to corpses at a moment’s notice. And they really do rush,